Building Capacity in Nonprofit Organizations

Offers a capacity building model that is based on a review of civil society, sustainable development, and organizational management literature. Reviews effective capacity building programs sponsored or operated by foundations. Includes recommendations

Size of the Vela Pulsar's Emission Region at 13 cm Wavelength

We present measurements of the size of the Vela pulsar in 3 gates across the pulse, from observations of the distribution of intensity. We calculate the effects on this distribution of noise in the observing system, and measure and remove it using observations of a strong continuum source. We also calculate and remove the expected effects of averaging in time and frequency. We find that effects of variations in pulsar flux density and instrumental gain, self-noise, and one-bit digitization are undetectably small. Effects of normalization of the correlation are detectable, but do not affect the fitted size. The size of the pulsar declines from 440 +/- 90 km (FWHM of best-fitting Gaussian distribution) to less than 200 km across the pulse. We discuss implications of this size for theories of pulsar emission.Comment: 51 pages, 10 figures. To appear in ApJ. Also available at http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~cgwinn/pulsar/size_14.p

Plasma charging damage reduction in IC processing by a self-balancing interconnect

A small TPC has been read out by means of a Medipix2 chip as direct anode. A Micromegas foil was placed Click to view the MathML source above the chip, and electron multiplication occurred in the gap. With a He/isobutane 80/20 mixture, gas multiplication factors up to tens of thousands were achieved, resulting in an efficiency for detecting single electrons of better than 90%. With this new readout technology for gas-filled detectors we recorded many image frames containing 2D images with tracks from cosmic muons. Along these tracks, electron clusters were observed, as well as ?-rays. With a gas layer thickness of only 1 mm, the device could be applied as vertex detector, outperforming all Si-based detectors

Quasar Proper Motions and Low-Frequency Gravitational Waves

We report observational upper limits on the mass-energy of the cosmological gravitational-wave background, from limits on proper motions of quasars. Gravitational waves with periods longer than the time span of observations produce a simple pattern of apparent proper motions over the sky, composed primarily of second-order transverse vector spherical harmonics. A fit of such harmonics to measured motions yields a 95%-confidence limit on the mass-energy of gravitational waves with frequencies <2e-9 Hz, of <0.11/h*h times the closure density of the universe.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure. Also available at http://charm.physics.ucsb.edu:80/people/cgwinn/cgwinn_group/index.htm

New Pulsars from an Arecibo Drift Scan Search

We report the discovery of pulsars J0030+0451, J0711+0931, and J1313+0931 that were found in a search of 470 square degrees at 430 MHz using the 305m Arecibo telescope. The search has an estimated sensitivity for long period, low dispersion measure, low zenith angle, and high Galactic latitude pulsars of ~1 mJy, comparable to previous Arecibo searches. Spin and astrometric parameters for the three pulsars are presented along with polarimetry at 430 MHz. PSR J0030+0451, a nearby pulsar with a period of 4.8 ms, belongs to the less common category of isolated millisecond pulsars. We have measured significant polarization in PSR J0030+0451 over more than 50% of the period, and use these data for a detailed discussion of its magnetospheric geometry. Scintillation observations of PSR J0030+0451 provide an estimate of the plasma turbulence level along the line of sight through the local interstellar medium.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, Accepted for Publication in Ap

Coherently Dedispersed Polarimetry of Millisecond Pulsars

We present a large sample of high-precision, coherently-dedispersed polarization profiles of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) at frequencies between 410 and 1414 MHz. These data include the first polarimetric observations of several of the pulsars, and the first low-frequency polarization profiles for others. Our observations support previous suggestions that the pulse shapes and polarimetry of MSPs are more complex than those of their slower relatives. An immediate conclusion is that polarimetry-based classification schemes proposed for young pulsars are of only limited use when applied to millisecond pulsars.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figures. Text matches version that appeared in ApJS. Full paper with high-resolution figures available at ftp://ftp.jb.man.ac.uk/pub/psr/papers/msppolpton.ps.g